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MWC ’18, Day 4: Highlights from the show

by

Theresa Bui

The curtain has come down on an outstanding week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Over 100,000 people attended the show, and in addition to hearing from business leaders from around the globe at the conference keynotes, attendees also had the opportunity to hear from a record breaking 2,300 exhibitors at the exhibition.

The popularity of our Cisco IoT booth at Innovation City in Hall 4 demonstrated that global service providers were as keen as ever to learn more about the exciting ways they can deliver IoT services for their customers. Of particular interest was our announcement of the global availability of Control Center for NB-IoT. You can read more about that story here.

Our new service provider partner Entel Peru stopped by the booth to talk about how it’ll be using Cisco Jasper Control Center to help its customers deliver innovative new services. There’s more on that story here. Ove Fredheim, CMO Business, Telenor Norway came to see us and talk about how Telenor is digitizing the public sector, check out our video interview with him here.

Altice Portugal was also at MWC to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Cisco. In the first project under this MoU, Altice Portugal and Cisco, in collaboration with Janz, developed a proof of concept of Water Telemetry to explore Cisco’s Ultra IoT capabilities to launch new IoT services. This system -which consists of the Cisco Ultra Services Platform – a virtualized, 5G-ready mobile services core, enables the availability of the new mobile network protocols targeted to IoT, namely NB-IoT. It also includes the eSCEF module, which exposes network capabilities and resources to vertical applications and IoT platforms with integrated API management.

Apana was on hand to talk about its smart water management solution, check out the video here. And check out all of these stories and much more, including interviews with Macario Namie and Glo Gordon, on the official Cisco IoT Twitter channel. And in recognition of our continued effort to innovate, the GSMA visited our booth to announce that Cisco IoT Control Center 7.0 for Connected Cars was the 2018 GLOMO winner of Best Mobile Innovation for Automotive.

Connected car was undoubtedly one of the key themes at this year’s MWC. GSMA even had World Champion Formula 1 driver Fernando Alonso on stage talking about the important role that data plays in motor sport. Meanwhile, my colleagues and I were on hand to keep members of the media informed about the importance of data management in a world where a near exponential growth rate for connected devices means we have more data than ever before feeding into more applications than ever before.

As if to emphasize this accelerating growth rate, Qualcomm announced at the show that its revenues from IoT alone for 2017 exceeded $1 billion. The firm is shipping 1 million IoT chipsets every day, with chips installed in 1.5 billion devices globally. As noted in day 1’s blog, when 5G does arrive, we’re going to see that already stratospheric figure skyrocket. Cisco is expecting to see 27 billion connected devices on service provider networks by 2021.

From the news and views on display at the Fira Gran Via this week those figures might even be a conservative estimate. Undoubtedly, the primary focus at the show was on the potential of 5G. In 12 months’ time when we come back to Barcelona, we can expect to see some practical examples of how service providers are using the next gen RAN in even more innovative IoT solutions.